Why are people so stupid? Why do people support actions and people that work against there own interests? They do you know. It is a Horatio Alger thing. Only smart people will get that reference.

Well, I chalk it up (maybe I should say chuck it up) to evolution. Yep. Most people, even really educated ones, do not understand the concept of evolution. Survival of the fittest is a rather misleading shorthand phrase. Fittest does not mean best. Fit only means having reproduced oneself biologically. If you live to pass on your traits you have been successful evolutionarily. You are fit. The fittest means leaving behind the most surviving offspring.

Intelligence is not a fit trait. At least not high intelligence. The more educated someone is the fewer children that person is likely to have. Presuming education equates at some level with intelligence, having fewer children than everyone else is going to mean there are very few intelligent people in the population.

Culture is supposed to evade this fact of life by being the way we pass on information outside of the biological dictates of genetics. Culture allows us pass on knowledge to individuals who share no family connections with us.

Basically, intelligence helps us all, but it doesn’t stop the ignorant from overpopulating the planet by at least one half.

And who am I calling stupid? You really want me to make enemies don’t you?

Well adherents of the extremist Quiverfull brand of über-patriarchal fundamentalism for one. Actually the males in this cult are exhibiting an often-practiced male animal behavior. It is the social chador American ultra-conservative American Fundamentalism.

Fox News watchers, secondly. ’nuff said.

Climate change deniers.

Namby-Pamby Democrats who try to avoid any strong and or progressive stands.

Republicans who know they are liars.

If we do not start using the knowledge we have, then well, we deserve the massive multi-system collapse that awaits us within just a few years from economic, environmental, and climatic catastrophes.

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe is almost certainly the next chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He is an idiot.

This is the Third in a Series of Topical Summaries about BlogHer 12 in New York

Blogging about blogging may be a bit less of the navel gazer recursive exercise than it would at first glance seem to be. The publication industry is changing, and that change is strikingly apparent when I look back over how sponsor presentation has changed at BlogHer since my first acquaintance with it in in 2007 in Chicago. There are several elements of sponsor awareness I would like to touch upon here and none of these elements are static or one directional. Huh?

The New Publication Schema

I don’t mean to go all brainy, wordy on you here, but this is important if you want to be aware of the BlogHer environment as an example of the new publishing environment (notice I did not say “new media” — jargon quickly ages and loses meaning) and new content production and payment models. The elements I am talking about are not really elements or things as much as they are processes. And processes are slippery little beggars.

Publishing is not dead. Don’t believe it. Publishing is undergoing a metamorphosis from slow moving, but voracious caterpillar to a flight capable butterfly that flits from bloom to bloom. This publishing butterfly will reproduce itself; but needed, useful, and useless mutations will all, I suspect, appear in the very next generation.

The Differences

When I first attended BlogHer in Chicago in 2007 the sponsor area was small and looked like it might have grown out of a very savvy Community College writing conference. That is not a bad thing. Please notice I did not say evolved from a PTA bake sale. The sponsor area this year seemed to have slid into a pair of Christian Louboutin pumps, and come of age overnight — per the Manhattan I saw it sipping at one of the “parties,” while pimping her new status as one of the darlings of the New Girl Network as evidenced by the number of industry scouts in the crowds at talks/sessions. (New Girl as opposed to the old boy network, get it? Duh of course you do. All of us in the know about tech, advertising, and blogging get IT.)

Next year’s event will be absolutely amazing at Chicago’s McCormick whatever-it-is-called-now. This almost makes me teary-eyed. For real. I feel like my little sister is all grown up and painting the town techno pink – with sleeves!

Oh keeriiist, I love hyperbole!

What Sponsors Have Realized

Sponsors have realized that women read blogs and that blogs are the new magazines. There are different types of sponsors, though. Magazine publishers have realized that bloggers united have more power over them than the traditional labor unions of the past because access to publishing platforms does not require writers and content creators to include them in the loop.

What Sponsors/Companies Have Not Realized

(not so much the PR firms they have hired)

there are several types and levels of bloggers

a stated policy of “we do not pay bloggers” shows that cretins run many big firms and still live in the patriarchal 20th Century

bloggers do not write product reviews for spare change

if the FTC treats us like publishers and/or journalists then the big boys are missing out if they don’t tap us while they can still afford us

going around is often easier than going through

women rule social media

women may be bloggers without being Mommy Bloggers

women may be bloggers and be a Mom too

advertising, consulting, and affiliate statuses and other partnerships are the flip side of “paying bloggers”

advertising entities may become clients of bloggers and not the other way around

Why every single one of these sponsors and/or their PR companies isn’t running as fast as their chubby little corporate legs will carry them to snatch up me and my expertise is beyond me.

What Bloggers Have Realized

Bloggers are starting to take themselves seriously. But they are still learning how to do that.

bloggers have a commodity to sell and control many of the distribution channels for that commodity

they don’t know how to define, sell, or trade commodities

they have to determine what they are worth

they are worth more than a free tube of mascara

sex is a biological necessity and that information management is actually the world’s oldest profession

they can speak directly to potential advertisers

What This Means

Content creators, platforms, and advertisers/sponsors are likely to emerge as the new stable triad of publishing. Print publishers and magazines need not be in the loop at all if writers want to produce the contemporary equivalent of books, or magazine articles. Know how is gaining on money in the publishing home stretch.

Next year in Chicago, BlogHer won’t be the Consumer Electronics Show, it will however give a preview as to what the next CES may be.

Different times require different thoughts and actions. Friends, as I am sure you know, we are headed into very different times. Many say we are headed toward very difficult times as we face: global warming. fundamentalist frictions, a world wide health crisis, over exploitation of dwindling resources, economic clashes between the very few rich and the massive numbers of the poor.

Gregory Bateson, a visionary thinker of the 20th Century, defined information as “any difference that makes a difference.”

We are awash in difference. How we handle the information embedded in those differences will determine whether these coming constraints limit or enable.

We are at a point of punctuation in the process understood as evolution. All this means is that we are at a time of rapid change and can expect rapid expression of emergent properties activated by novel contextual triggers. The concept is understood as punctuated equilibrium.

We’re at a beginning point of of major world changes, climatic, and ecosphere destabilization from deforestation, toxic poisoning that will result in changes significant enough to probably create speciation and branching. Or that is what we have to hope for. The alternative is extinction.

Late Boomers grew up with civil unrest, toxic spills, war, and our older brothers and sisters giving up the fight when we most needed them; when the the republican corporatists started to take over. They almost succeeded, but there is still time to stop corporations from killing the rest of the world. We can’t stop change, but we can ameliorate the damage to some degree. I am beginning to think we are the only ones who can. We’ve been prepped for this role all our lives.

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About Me

I have written and published many blogs over the last 15 years on the topics of Later Born Baby Boomers, Peace & Justice Activism, Virtual Worlds, Gene Stratton-Porter, and Medical Child Abuse. I love research, information and the quest for knowledge. I'm an anthropologist by training, and a freelance content creator by vocation. I love things that make sense, could be, and might be so I enjoy good speculative fiction along the lines of Cory Doctorow and TV shows like Dr. Who and Orphan Black.